The Future of College Football
How I see realignment, NIL, and more playing out in the future
Note: The topic for this article came from subscriber Andy. Thank you for reading all of my newsletters and your kind words about SID Sports! It’s things like that which keep this newsletter going. If you have a topic you want to see covered here, email me at sidsports23@gmail.com, or find me on Twitter, Substack Notes, Facebook, and Threads.
College football does not look recognizable. For long-time fans, the sport has drastically changed in the past few years. Players now can get paid. Media deals have shaken up the sport’s landscape. One of the nation’s most storied conferences, the PAC-12, is no more. The playoff is expanding. Things are different.
For better or for worse, this sport is changing. College football will never be the same.
So, in one last doomscrolling article before the season gets underway, let’s take a look at what’s coming after the 2023 season. What does that mean for your school? And, what is coming down the pipe for college football.
Realignment
Okay, I’ll admit it. I’m kind of getting sick of realignment. Sure, the one day demise of the PAC-12 was a lot of fun, but was it really?
Yes, it played out like a hit drama show and scratched an itch only college football fans could find. But, it may have changed the sport for the next few decades.
I’m not going to get into too many specifics here, I already did last week. But, let’s take a look at how realignment affects the entire sport, not just the Power Five. If you want to get more into the nitty-gritty of financial details of realignment, check out my last piece on the end of the PAC-12:
We talked a lot about media shares in that newsletter, and that’s going to continue to be a sticking point going forward. Schools want to make money, and the top of the college football landscape is only getting richer. If you want to compete, you have to have capital and backing. Most schools just don’t. That’s going to hurt the smaller schools, namely the Group of Five.
Now, that’s not to say that quality of play in the Group of Five is going to drop. Players are more talented than ever before. That trickles down to every level of college athletics, and makes sure that every level is fun to watch in its own right. But, that’s going to hurt the chances of magical G5 runs like the P.J. Fleck-led Western Michigan run in 2016, the Boise State run in 2006, and more recently, the utter domination of Luke Fickell’s Cincinnati in the American. We likely won’t see those as more money and more players head to the top of the sport.
College football is clearly consolidating into two main conferences: the Big 10 and the SEC. The ACC is showing cracks, and has since I discussed it way back in May. Superconferences are coming.
But it’s not just conference allegiances that are being thrown away, it’s longstanding rivalry games. This run of realignment has taken away Bedlam (Oklahoma-Oklahoma State), the Apple Cup (Washington-Washington State), the Civil War (Oregon-Oregon State), and threatens more like the Battle for the Seminole War Canoe (Florida State-Miami). That’s after previous realignment has relegated iconic rivalries like The Backyard Brawl (Pittsburgh-West Virginia) and Good, Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate (Georgia-Georgia Tech) to out of conference scheduling nightmares.
Sure, realignment has brought some rivalries, like the Holy War (BYU-Utah), and Texas-Texas A&M back, but it’s done more harm than good.
At it’s core, college football is a regional sport. It’s about beating that team you dare not say the name of. It’s about rubbing your team’s win in the face of old friends that chose the wrong school to attend. Now, instead of the Backyard Brawl being a conference matchup, we’re subjected to Washington at Rutgers.
NIL
While realignment can be pretty easily seen as a net negative for college sports, NIL is much, much more complicated. For those that need an explainer, I covered what NIL is on April 10 when discussing the establishment and lofty goals of Michigan’s NIL collective.
NIL has been a long time coming. It’s a good thing. If you need more convincing, just watch the Netflix Untold about Johnny Manziel to learn about why not paying players is a bad thing. With paychecks skyrocketing across the nation for athletic departments and coaches, players deserve a chance to secure even part of that.
But, NIL came with a two-edged sword. Players are now more inclined to chase a payday. Just take a look at the botched recruitment of Jaden Rashada by Florida. Quinn Ewers committing to Texas, receiving a massive NIL offer to go to Ohio State, spending a year with the Buckeyes behind C.J. Stroud, and transferring to Texas.
I think this is a problem that gets resolved, though. As I mentioned in my April NIL article, there are three upcoming court cases that dictate the future of NIL. Johnson v. NCAA aims to have student-athletes recognized as student employees and receive the same protections as other student employees. House v. NCAA takes aim at the NCAA’s definition and limits to “impermissible benefits.” Finally, Hubbard v. NCAA looks to make the NCAA back-pay missed Alston payments.
That’s a lot to take in, so I suggest reading my previous article if you want more on each of those cases.
Either way, NIL is going to be regulated. The NCAA has shown that it doesn’t want to take the reigns on that. Even Congress realizes this, and a group of senators recently announced the College Athlete Bill of Rights, which aims to protect and expand the rights of college athletes.
In particular, the new bill, if enacted, would prohibit the NCAA from limiting NIL payments, set financial penalties for schools violating a player’s NIL rights, establish a Commission on College Athletics to oversee the NCAA and act on human rights on behalf of the players, and allow the CDC to set standards for student-athletes’ mental and physical health along with safety.
NIL won’t continue as some wild west of boosters tossing bags of cash towards student-athletes. Those days are over. But, let’s be straight on one thing: college athletes should be paid for their name, image and likeness. I’m not saying they need to sign million dollar mega-deals. I’m saying that a cut of jersey sales should go to them. They should be able to appear in commercials. Let them capitalize on their success. They deserve it.
The transfer portal
While this may seem the least controversial of the topics we’ve discussed, this is the one that has drawn a lot of the online ire I’ve seen.
Currently, all players are awarded one free transfer with immediate eligibility. They also can transfer upon the completion of their degree.
That’s a big change from before, when student-athletes had to sit out a year and lose out on eligibility. A lot of people feel like that was a great system, and kept the focus on academics. They are student-athletes after all. Similar, many say the new transfer rules take the emphasis away from the student part of student-athlete. I’ve even been among them, writing a research paper on the topic in spring 2019 (no, you can’t read it. But, I promise it was good).
Since then, though, my perspective has changed. I’m not trying to sway you to the side of the portal, but keep an open mind for a second.
The portal may actually be good for college football. Gasp! That’s right, allowing players to transfer has improved the quality of play across the board. Sure, players that succeed at the Group of Five level are jumping to Power Five, just take a look at Jared Verse, the defensive star of Florida State heading into 2023. He transferred to the Seminoles ahead of last season from FCS Albany. Or Carson Steele heading to UCLA after dominating at Ball State in 2022.
But, there’s just as many moves giving players a chance to actually play and shine. For example, Samson Evans was buried in Iowa’s running back depth chart. Now, he’s been named to the Walter Camp and Doak Walker watchlists as Eastern Michigan’s top tailback.
Sometimes, these players just chose the wrong school. And that happens. Plenty of first-year college students choose the wrong school for them and transfer to a better fit. Shouldn’t college football players be afforded that same luxury?
Yes, NIL plays a role in the portal. That should be reigned in, as we discussed earlier. Tampering also needs to be addressed. There are players speaking out about being recruited by other schools while enrolled and happy in their current program. That can’t happen. It isn’t allowed in the professional ranks, and it shouldn’t be allowed in college either.
No matter which side of the portal argument you land on, the numbers indicate the portal is here to stay. ESPN’s Tom VanHaaren reported that 8,699 players entered the portal from May 1 to August 1 2023. Now, that’s across all levels of NCAA-sponsored football, but that’s still a record. In fact, each year, the record for players in the portal is broken.
Whether you like it or not, the transfer portal is here to stay. It’ll undergo some changes, especially as the NIL mess is handled, but it’s not going away.
Future
Right now, college football has me feeling like Squidward when he was blasted into the future. The future is full of change, and different than what we’ve come to know and love.
The top is only going to get richer. With superconferences on the horizon, the schools at the nation’s top levels are going to sign massive media deals. They’re going to rake in the athletic, bowl-based benefits. They’re going to have a stranglehold on the national championship.
The only hope for the leftovers, the Group of Five and the Power Five schools you forget about like Vanderbilt, is the expanded playoff. In 2024, the field grows from four to 12. That’s a big change, especially since the top six conference champions have automatic bids to the big dance.
Everything changes in 2026, though. Then, the ESPN contract is up and the college football world will hit its next crossroads. How many conference champions get in? What do the at larges look like? Do the entrants have to come from a Power conference? We don’t know what the next playoff deal looks like. If you think it’s going to go smoother than realignment, think again. This is going to be a bloodbath.
Coupling that with the increasingly more likely idea that the power schools are going to break away from the NCAA in football, the next few years are going to be tough. They’re going to define what the sport we love is going to turn into.
The biggest question Andy left me was does this hurt the schools not at the top of college football? Right now, I’d have to say yes. While NIL and the transfer portal can help them inject some talent into their rosters and keep play interesting, those players are looking to go big time. They’re going to bolt to a bigger school if they have a chance, whether that is for a shot at the NFL or for an NIL payout that G5 schools can’t match.
But, let me leave you on a point of hope: sports as a whole are cyclical. Everything has a chance to come back. I personally think that there will be a return to regionalism at some point down the road. But first, we’ll have to make it to the other side of this superconference, media deal money grab. Hopefully the smaller schools can make it to the other side too.